Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report: In the nation’s current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas of human meaning and definition. Why leave work undone? I suggest,… Continue reading No God Left Behind
Category: Academia
Money and Meetings
Two quick academic links: First, Eugene Wallingford on fundraising, which these days extends down to the departmental level. He has good thoughts on the raising of money, and the issues he talks about sound awfully familiar. I’d add one thing to his advice– if you’re pursuing big gifts, make sure the donor is as specific… Continue reading Money and Meetings
Are Bloggers Smarter Than High-School Kids?
As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don’t have to work under test conditions, with a tight… Continue reading Are Bloggers Smarter Than High-School Kids?
Classic Edition: GenEd Daydreams
Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It’s probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn’t have to… Continue reading Classic Edition: GenEd Daydreams
First Weekend
The first weekend of the Fall term is always a strange time. Classes are back in session, so I’m in Teaching Mode, but there really isn’t that much to do, because I haven’t collected any work requiring grading yet. I always feel like the last weekend before classes ought to be some grand last hurrah… Continue reading First Weekend
Small School Hiring Bias
The Female Science Professor offers some thoughts on institutional hiring: Only one graduate in the past 10 years from my research group is now a professor at a small liberal arts college, and that person attended a SLAC as an undergraduate. When I was in job-search mode, I got interviews at SLACs, as did my… Continue reading Small School Hiring Bias
They Got a Perfect 20 on the New SAT
On Inside Higher Ed this morning: The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville Sun reported. But, hey, the football team is supposed to… Continue reading They Got a Perfect 20 on the New SAT
How to Score Well Without Really Writing
Today’s New York Times has a story on the new SAT, particularly the writing test. The print version has images of the opening lines of three essays that received a perfect score, while the on-line version includes images of the full text of three perfect-score essays. The essays themselves are kind of interesting to look… Continue reading How to Score Well Without Really Writing
Academic Links Dump
Articles have been piling up in my Bloglines feeds as I keep saying “Oh, that’ll make a good blog post…” and then not getting around to actually writing anything. In an effort to clean things up a bit (in much the same way that I clean my desk off every September, whether it needs it… Continue reading Academic Links Dump
Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty
Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We’ve been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this… Continue reading Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty